I Was Not Part of the 90s Culture Wars

As my last post probably showed, I was wrapped in my privilege for most of my life. I had no idea where or how the feminists were fighting. White hetero male was oblivious.

Some folks have decided Christina Hoff Sommers is deserving of her self-labeling as a Feminist. Yet, she works for the mighty right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The right-wing is far from giving a crap about how women are treated. Women are barely people to the current conservatives.

I mean this: Christina Hoff Sommers, in her many recent public statements about rape and sexual assault in America, understates the prevalence of rape in this country in ways that are unsupported by the evidence. She analogizes America’s rape crisis to entirely invented “crises” of the past while wildly overstating the evidence for the existence of an epidemic of false rape claims. To read her writing, watch her videos, and follow her on Twitter is to be given a wholly unrealistic impression of the scale and seriousness of rape in America. And that’s the case — and this is crucial — even if you agree with her contention that rape reporting data is seriously flawed.

Let me say that again, because this was a core claim that her supporters made on Saturday afternoon: I am not calling Christina Hoff Sommers a rape denialist because we rely on different statistical estimates of the prevalence of rape. I am calling her a rape denialist because the way she deploys even her own preferred statistics is fundamentally bogus.

That article goes on to show how Sommers is either being dishonest, disingenuous, or completely out of touch with reality.